Tweetrad.io: Listen to Twitter Search Results

November 4, 2009

Here’s something fun and amusing. We just happened upon Tweetrad.io, a site that treats tweets from your Twitter searches like tunes on an old school radio channel, so tweets are read aloud by an automated Twitter DJ as they roll in.

The site is self-explanatory, as you can search for tweets, or select from the pre-programmed channels or trending topics, and listen to the tweets instead of having to waste the effort of actually reading them. It may sound a little a dry in theory, but in practice, it’s absolutely hilarious. Curious about how this funky new TwitterTwitter

“We use a distributed network of converter bots to handle the work queue. Jobs are placed on the queue via api calls from the javascript client that interacts with twitter’s search api directly in order to avoid rate limiting of a centralized search server. Our app server is a lightweight Sinatra service that handles job queueing. We stream the audio directly from our nginx web server as they become available via the conversion process.

We are trying to decide if this app has a real use case or if it’s just a fun thing. One of the ideas we are thinking about is an iphone app for keeping up with your tweet stream on the go. We would love to hear your feedback.”

We think it’s both fun and potentially practical, though we don’t have an amazing use case or business model to serve up just yet. We do know, however, that if they release an iPhone app, they’ll have to compete with existing apps like Twuner.

Just in case you’re not ready to take our word on how awesome it is, we made a short screencast of Tweetrad.io in action. Check it out below.